This cycle of sorrow, anger seems endless
National columnist Suzette Hackney is in Minneapolis for the trial of Derek Chauvin, reporting on the people, the scene and the mood.
MINNEAPOLIS – It has been overcast and rainy here for almost a week. Showers are relentless and inconvenient. Clouds hang low, dark and sometimes menacing. A chill in the air clings to our bones.
The weather is a metaphor for the endless loop of rage and despair many Black Minnesotans – and Americans – feel and have felt for years.
Under the shadow of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s trial – one of the highest-profile legal proceedings of our generation – another Black man has died just 10 miles from the city. He was shot by a Brooklyn Center police officer during a traffic stop Sunday. His name is Daunte Wright. He was 20 years old.
Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon said the officer mistakenly grabbed her firearm instead of her Taser.
In a news conference Monday, Gannon characterized the shooting as an “accidental discharge.”
As word started trickling in Sunday evening about Wright’s death, I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. I began praying. “Please, Jesus, not right now. Please don’t let this be true. How much more can this community take? How much more can Black people take? This can’t be happening right now; it’s just not possible. Please?”
But here in the Twin Cities, this is a place where a Black man dies at the hands of police over an alleged counterfeit $20. This is a place where a Black man dies at the hands of police over an expired license plate and a warrant for failure to appear in court – for possession of a small amount of marijuana.
Of course, it’s not just a Minneapolisarea thing. Ask Virginia Army Lt. Caron Nazario how lucky he feels to be alive after a traffic stop in December when he held his hands up through the driver’s side window but still got blasted with pepper spray, berated, dehumanized and forced to the ground.
The officers said in the police report that they stopped Nazario’s Chevrolet
Tahoe because it didn’t have a rear license plate. The report acknowledges the officers later noticed a temporary plate displayed in the back window.
Nazario, wearing his fatigues and repeatedly telling officers he was a military officer, said he was afraid to get out of the SUV.
Do you know why Nazario was afraid to get out of his vehicle? Because he believed he could be killed.
I drove with expired tags a few times last year. My birthday is in early April, and I would have needed to update my plate stickers right in the thick of the COVID-19 lockdown. Every time I got behind the wheel, I found myself uncontrollably shaking with fear. This anxiety is inherent in people who look like me because of incidents like what happened to Nazario and Wright.
We fear for our lives.
And we are tired of those who want to justify the abuse and destruction of Black and brown bodies by asking: Why didn’t he comply? All he had to do was cooperate and he’d be alive today.
Imagine the fear that Wright felt, particularly as Chauvin’s trial plays out in his backyard; the graphic details burned into our core day after day. Nazario told officers the fear he felt. It’s real. It’s painful. It’s traumatizing and sometimes crippling.
And some days, sadly, that fear moves beyond the shaking and the fear and leads us back into the headlines. Again.
As Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott said Monday of his police officers: “We cannot afford to make mistakes that lead to the loss of life.”
Yet mistake or not, it happens time and time again – just like the rain.
As word started trickling in Sunday evening about Wright’s death, I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. I began praying.